


a new hope

by jasondont (minigami)



Series: a million little battles [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Order 66, Pre-Fix-It, no beta we die like etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25726915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minigami/pseuds/jasondont
Summary: A holocron is a Jedi artefact designed to send and receive messages as well as store information.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Series: a million little battles [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1821466
Comments: 9
Kudos: 151





	a new hope

**Author's Note:**

> this is set a few months after order 66. it's sad! but it'll get better soon, i promise!
> 
> i think this series is almost over. i have a couple more instalments in mind (the reunion, the getting together, maybe some awful but relatively light-hearted story early on in the war) and then i'll be done. thank you all for reading <3

The apartment building is completely silent save for the muffled sound of their helmet comms, Vader’s rasping breath and the furious humming of his red lightsaber. The thing’s hilt is ugly and ungainly, if strangely familiar. 24 doesn’t like looking at it. Every time he tries he can feel his eyes jump over and around it, skittish as if he were a shiny before its first battle.   
It did its job, in any case. The traitor lies dead at their feet, 24’s blaster still cold in his hand. They found him in the dwelling’s only room, a small, dingy place with a pallet-like bed next to one of the walls and not much else. 

They must have been a Padawan. They look seventeen, eighteen standard, all pale blue limbs and wide staring eyes. They lie crumbled next to their bed, their lightsaber next to their right hand. 24 feels his own hand twitch on his blaster, the impulse to pick it up almost too strong to contain, and forces himself to look away.  
Vader hooks his own weapon to his belt, the gesture practised and then calls the ‘saber to him with barely a twitch of his fingers. The suit hinders his movements: to look around the room he must move his whole body.   
24 wonders what he is looking for, but he keeps quiet, his spine straight, most of his attention on the familiar voices of his men calling to each other in the internal comm of his helmet while they methodically clear the building. 

Suddenly, Vader kneels next to the pallet. He reaches one long, black arm underneath it and when it surfaces, he holds something in his hand. It looks like a box, and it’s beautiful. Glass and burnished metal, shining silver and blue in the dirty light that filters through the grimy windows that line the far wall of the room. It looks cared for, well-loved---it’s the cleanest thing 24 has seen in hours.   
It’s a holocron. A Jedi artefact meant to store information and send and receive messages. 

24 blinks. At first, he doesn’t know _how_ he knows that, but then he remembers. Kenobi’s small cabin in the _Negotiator_ , another holocron very much like the one Vader holds resting, innocent, on his desk.   
He noticed 24 looking at it and his silent curiosity, and so he explained what it was without waiting to be asked. 

Vader stands up once again, the holocron held in his hand. For a while, he just looks at it, as still as a statue. And then he does something, and 24 feels the air vibrate and hum and almost sing, and the holocron raises itself from his palm.   
“This is Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi,” a man’s voice says. “I regret to report that both our Jedi Order and the Republic have fallen with the dark shadow of the Empire rising to take their place. This message is a warning and a reminder for any surviving Jedi.”

The recording keeps going on and on and on, and 24 keeps silent, his sight focused on Kenobi’s figure, small and translucid where it’s held by Vader’s huge black fist.   
There’s something caught in his throat. He tries and fails to clear it, the hoarse sound much too loud in the silent, bloody room. Vader’s breathing is like a bellow, mechanical and regular. He doesn’t move. 24 wonders what he’s looking at: he can’t tell with the helmet.

The recording ends. Something clicks, and then it begins once again.  
“This is Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Kenobi says, his voice tinny but certain, level. It took a lot to make him sound agitated or out of breath; 24 remembers that clearly.  
“CC-2224.” Vader’s voice makes him jump. 24 straightens his spine, holds his blaster tighter.  
“My Lord?”  
A beat.   
“You were his once,” he says, his voice deep and inexpressive, and 24 feels something clench in his chest, cold and heavy. Suddenly he can’t breathe, and he wonders if this is it for him. He must have done something to displease Vader; he wonders what it is with the surety he’ll never know.

“Commander.” 

That’s an order.

“Yes.” Yes, I was his once. Yes, I remember. Yes, it doesn’t matter anymore. 

Yes, my Lord. That's what he should have said. 

The temperature drops so much and so suddenly 24 can feel it through the crappy plastoid of his armour. One of the windows cracks. Vader makes a fist, and the holocron starts to tremble, the voice loses its familiar quality---the noise cuts off, and a ball of glass and tarnished metal falls to the duracrete floor of the room with a dull thunk. It rolls, and 24 does not dare move his gaze from Vader’s wide back, but he can feel it when it stops next to his boot. 

“Not anymore,” Vader says. 

The Sith Lord turns around. When he leaves the room, his black cloak hits 24’s vambraces, the colour striking over the white of his armour.   
24 waits one, two, three seconds, until the sound of his heavy steps disappears at his back and the voices of his men dim. Then he takes off his helmet. He’s soaked in sweat, and when he lowers his head a drop falls right between his feet, next to the metal ball. 24 goes down on one knee and grabs hold of the destroyed holocron. It’s so cold he can feel it through his gauntlet.  
He should drop it, leave it here, next to the small corpse of its owner. It’s broken and useless, and if he’s caught with it they’ll write him up and send him back to Kamino, or something worse.   
And looking at it makes him feel _wrong_ , cold and breathless and sick to his stomach. 

He was his. Kenobi’s. Kenobi was his general. When the time came he had the traitor shot, but the cannon missed; he failed. Kenobi survived. They saw him fall, impossibly small against the cliff wall, but he was so hard to kill, so very hard to put down; he had known that, after three years of working together. He had the pools dredged, but they never found the body.

24 has never dealt well with failure---he wasn’t made to. An imperfect tool is not a tool at all: it’s something else. He still doesn’t know why he wasn’t decommissioned: he should have been. 

He looks down to the small metal ball in his palm, a reminder of his failure, a death sentence if it is ever found in his grasp.  
He is completely incapable of making himself let it fall. 

**Author's Note:**

> vader is a little bitch
> 
> i'm jasondont @ tumblr! right now i'm mostly absent because i'm on holiday but hit me up if you want to talk about clones and space wizards


End file.
